Two weeks ago the Internet Movie Data Base—IMDb—deleted
all its discussion boards. These were message boards for starting
topics and posting replies on movies, television, and individuals who
were credited in movies and television.

In 1999, seven years before I listed Lady Magdalene’s,
my first movie, on IMDb, I started and replied to comments in the IMDb
message boards. I found the discussions collegial and enjoyable.

IMDb.com is a division of Amazon.com, as is Withoutabox.com, a
service for submitting independent films for festival play. IMDb
encouraged indie filmmakers such as myself to make as much use of IMDb
as possible to promote our films, including posting background info in
the IMDb message boards.

So I did, and that’s when the message boards turned into a
nightmare for me.

Withoutabox asked first-time directors to fill out a survey and
encouraged us to share it to the IMDb message boards. One of the
questions was obvious: what movie directors did we consider
influences? I answered with my favorites: Kubrick, Hitchcock,
Preminger.

The next thing I knew was a spate of messages: “Schulman
thinks he’s the next Kubrick, Hitchcock, Preminger!”

Anything I replied after that was a Chinese finger trap: the harder
I tried to pull away the tighter it held me.

From that day in 2006 through the shut down of the IMDb message
boards I was followed by what I soon learned were
“trolls”—anonymous writers using multiple
“sock puppet” accounts—who worked to destroy the
lives and works of anyone working in the film or television business
that they could.

Did it require any actual reasons? I don’t know. I think it
might be that it was the use of power for the sake of power. They did
it because they could and it felt good to feel empowered, even if it
was only the power to destroy. I don’t think any personal animus
was even required.

I was a prime target. I was accused of making up the film-festival
awards Lady Magdalene’s won. I was accused of writing the
positive reviews my movie received, or having my friends write them.
When I announced Kevin Sorbo would be starring in Alongside
Night I was accused of lying about it.

IMDb has user ratings for movies that have started play, ratings
from one to ten. The trolls used their multiple accounts so that
overnight hundreds of “1” ratings appeared for both my
movies on days the movie had played nowhere for months, and from
countries where the movie had never been seen. These ratings are
quoted all over the Internet, including on Amazon’s own catalog
pages.

Positive user reviews were called “fake” and downvoted
while negative user reviews were lauded by dozens of accounts.

Complaints on “Help” boards just increased the trolling
exponentially. Asking for help from IMDb staff did too, convincing me
that some of the trolls worked inside IMDb, and that IMDb was
encouraging trolls to increase the site’s traffic—likely
as a statistic IMDb management could show the parent company,
Amazon.

It didn’t stop at IMDb. The trolls went to Amazon when
Lady Magdalene’s first appeared as a streaming video and
a DVD, and dozens of killer one-star reviews appeared, many with the
exact same paragraphs, word for word. The trolls found my books and
started trashing them, too. I pulled Lady Magdalene’s off
sale from Amazon for several years in an attempt to mitigate the
damage to my overall reputation.

I was accused of writing my own Wikipedia article and that was
stripped of almost all true bio info posted by my fan base, replaced
by vicious falsehoods put there by my detractors.

I’ve written about most of this before. Why am I bringing it
up again now? To gloat that the IMDb trolls have to find another swamp
to infest?

No.

I’m here to point out that trolling has become mainstream.
The issue is no longer destruction of indie filmmakers on a now-
defunct entertainment media message board. It’s that IMDb was a
Potemkin Village to train an army of mainstream pundits who are now
using the same strategy and tactics to destroy political
opponents.

Milo Yiannopoulos has made a meal out of outrageous behavior,
trolling liberals on college campuses and in the media by pretending
to dark positions only because doing so triggers them. It became
unfunny when it resulted in rioting, vandalism, and arson.

Richard Spencer giving a Nazi salute to Donald Trump was similarly
performance art designed to gain attention by feeding into the Never-
Trump narrative that Trump was surrounding himself with bigots.
Spencer is a low-grade tribalist whose nationalism is so wimpy no
actual historical Nazi—or even neo-Nazi—would be as broad-
minded and inclusive. He’s a poseur.

So we get from the little fish to the whale.

Donald J. Trump, president of the United States, is now reduced to
being me, with his hand stuck in the Chinese finger trap.

The mainstream news media do to Trump exactly what the IMDb trolls
did to me: find nothing good and spin everything bad, even when
you’re saying something the trolls had previously stated as
their own position.

Trump trolls the trolls back like I tried to do, only he has an
immensely bigger fan base than I ever had. But Trump has counter-
trolling skill sets I never had.

When Kellyanne Conway misspoke and made a reference to a non-
existent Bowling Green Massacre, the news, commentary and comedy media
obssessed on it for days.

I think Trump has a learning curve.

So in a Florida rally when President Trump referred to something
horrific in Sweden that also never happened, these same media jumped
on the red meat again. I don’t think this second time was
accidental. I think it’s a calculated diversionary strategy to
move the attention-deficit news cycle away from the false
narrative—already refuted by Julian Assange—that Russia
put Trump in power.

My friend, writer, filmmaker, publisher Brad Linaweaver, has been
warning me for years of the destructive potential of the Internet. I
always argued back that without the Internet I would be completely
invisible since the major mainstream media—right, left, and even
libertarian—tend to downplay me if not marginalize me
completely.

But when I see how this destructive creature of the Internet has
now spread to all other media—when I see a civil war between a
crazy far left and a demented far right—I see Brad’s
point.

I see the remaining sane libertarians who haven’t been body-
snatched by puppet masters already, drowning in a polluted ocean
between them.

Changing metaphors, as I must:

The IMDb troll is now the size of Godzilla, and God save Tokyo, New
York, San Francisco, and us all.

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